Just when you thought he was due some Folsom Prison Blues, up pops Donald Trump in your Twitter timeline.

Yesterday, the US president poked his nose into Brexit in a move guaranteed to add to the clamour for a second referendum.

Effectively, Trump fired the starting gun on a UK-US chlorinated chicken trade deal in one sentence.

The self-styled Mr Brexit said: “My administration looks forward to negotiating a large scale trade deal with the United Kingdom. The potential is unlimited!”

The worst is yet to come.

We are now three years into the Trump presidency and he has not blown us all to kingdom come, which is a bit of a relief, I suppose.

But his gung-ho style and his remarkable communication skills – he has a knack for doing and saying the wrong thing and being rewarded for it – make him a hard opponent in next year’s presidential elections. I’ve lost count of the number of bozos throwing their hat into the Democrat ring.

The latest, former El Paso congressman Beto O’Rourke, looks like one of these lean-cut, clean-cut types that won’t be able to take down the dirty, street-fighting Trump.

The President’s reaction to his candidacy was to wonder out loud to reporters if O’Rourke was crazy because of the amount of hand movement he used.

When you wrestle with a pig, you’re going to get dirty, and the pig likes it.

Chlorinated chicken is going to be the cleanest thing we’ll see coming out of America as we approach an election year.

Donald Trump was branded “racist, a conman and a cheat” by Michael Cohen (Image: REUTERS)

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Prompted by a poem, no less, I asked, what is the Brexit temperature like in Dublin?

“The nation is holding its nerve,” my Irish friend replied with the bedside manner of a solicitous doctor.

The Irish Republic has, of course, the most to lose from a hard Brexit.

Every sector of the economy, from farming to pharmacy, would suffer a “severe impact” a fortnight from now, according to the Dublin Government’s assessment of “the situation”, another lovely euphemism for Brexit from the people who coined “the Emergency” for World War II and “the Troubles” for a bloody street war in the north.

Like everyone else, the Irish Government is braced for impact and set aside a grain store of money to compensate for the bodyblow to trade into its biggest market, the UK.

But my pal explained how some in the Irish Government have looked over the precipice and gamed beyond a hard exit.

They see a no-deal Brexit not as the end point, but the beginning of the UK’s eventual capitulation to the EU deal that has always been on offer – the only one on offer.

After a few months of no mushrooms on supermarket shelves and a 20 per cent drop in the value of sterling –leaving a litre of Spanish holiday lager costing more than a fiver – the UK Government will sign up, say some in Dublin.

Starving the Brits into acceptance might have a wonderful historic irony but is as much a flight of fancy as a clean Brexit itself, particularly as the Commons options begin to narrow to Theresa May’s Brexit or a lengthy extension (a political purgatory for us all).

By then, someone must start blaming the Irish, whose great success has been to get remarkable solidarity from the EU27 to stop them being picked off by the imperious instincts of the UK.

A No Border No Brexit sticker close to the Hands Across the Divide peace statue in Ireland (Image: 2019 Getty Images)

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Brexit is, after all, hopelessly snagged on Britain’s historic relationship with the island and a commitment to the backstop to keep open the border between British north and Republican south.

There were plenty of warnings about this lobster creel conundrum during the referendum campaign.

But the UK looked the other way, much as it did when the Good Friday Agreement turned Northern Ireland into something that was not wholly British or Irish and anchored in Europe.

The people of Northern Ireland understood this well and voted by majority to stay in the EU.

They are, thanks to tribal voting patterns and historic boycotts, mis-served at Westminster. The DUP, I expect, will eventually pay a price for being so badly out of step with a place that would rather see itself as a bridge, not a barrier, between the EU and the UK.

While Brexit has not shifted the dial on Scottish independence, surveys show 62 per cent of people in Northern Ireland believe Brexit makes a united Ireland, and continued membership of the EU, more likely.

That doesn’t mean it is what they want but if you’re young and Norn, and haven’t already left to study at a Scottish University, do the DUP represent the future?

The past is never far behind the future, though.

The New IRA has claimed responsibility for four parcel bombs sent to three London transport hubs and Glasgow University.

The events of Bloody Sunday resurfacing in a court case evoke old hurts and memories.

Even at the height of an Islamist terror threat MI5 still allocates 22 per cent of resources to countering Northern Ireland-related terrorism, all reminders of what is at stake

Often a single line that crystallises as an idea is the spark for an empty column.

This morning it was Radio Scotland’s thought for the day slot which quoted the Irish poet WB Yeats: “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,”

It seems apt for the times, doesn’t it?.

But there is now, apparently, a Yeats index, a ruling that the more quotable Yeats seems to commentators, the worse things actually are.

If the poet has made it on to Thought for the Day “the situation” must be quite bad.

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It pays to have had some experience of the real world before coming to parliament.

This week Falkirk MP John McNally, a barber shop owner for three decades before becoming an MP, introduced a petition to the Commons for the regulation of qualified hairdressers. This isn’t simply to protect you and me from a pudding bowl haircut from an unqualified shearsmith.

McNally told me the industry is very concerned that hairdressers shops are being set up as fronts for nail bar slavery and as county lines-style drugs distribution offices.

His experienced eye can tell a fake front from a genuine barber shop but the rest of us walk down the high street ignorant of what might be going on behind the barber’s chair.

It pays to have had some experience of the real world before coming to parliament. This week Falkirk MP John McNally, a barber shop owner for three decades before becoming an MP, introduced a petition to the Commons for the regulation of qualified hairdressers.

This isn’t simply to protect you and me from a pudding bowl haircut from an unqualified shearsmith.

McNally told me the industry is very concerned that hairdressers shops are being set up as fronts for nail bar slavery and as county lines-style drugs distribution offices.

His experienced eye can tell a fake front from a genuine barber shop but the rest of us walk down the high street ignorant of what might be going on behind the barber’s chair.